


but i will write you songs instead

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [4]
Category: Dr. Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Bad Parenting, Blood and Injury, Buried Alive, Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Immortality, Mechtober, Temporary Character Death, Whumptober 2020, collapsing building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26830207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: “Jonny,” she repeats. “I thought you were dead, I thought—oh, thank fuck, it worked. It worked! You’re—you’re still with me, I’m not—”“What worked?”(Whumptober Day 4: buried alive/collapsed building; Mechtober Day 4-6: family)
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 11
Kudos: 99
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	but i will write you songs instead

Dr. Carmilla turns around just in time to watch the squat concrete building crumble under the stress of the mines she planted there.

It’s too early. They weren’t supposed to go off for half an hour, and she hasn’t touched the detonator in her hand, but that doesn’t change the fact that the dust cloud spreading from the wreckage is threatening to engulf her. There are at least a dozen people inside—not that she cares about them; they would’ve died before long anyway, and they won’t feel much in their augmented reality.

But Jonny was still inside the building. Jonny probably set the mines off himself, impatient as he is. She can’t breathe through the dust, and even she could be incapacitated for a bit by the shrapnel, but nothing will keep her away from that building until she gets Jonny out.

By the time she’s close enough to start looking for him, she has to stop every few steps to lean on her cane and catch her breath. The air is painfully hot, even as the powdery remains of the concrete structure settle around her like heavy snow. She doesn’t think that she set  _ that  _ many mines—what else did Jonny have up his sleeve? She’ll have to ask him if she finds him. When she finds him. She  _ needs  _ to find him.

It’s a big building, and she has no idea where to start, until she hears a sound that could be concrete shifting or, if she’s lucky, a cough. She pauses to listen, and it repeats once, twice, followed by something that reminds her painfully of the noise Jonny makes when she won’t let him steal something he really wants. Traversing the broken rubble takes its toll on her, but within a few minutes, she finds the source of the sound, just in time for it to go quiet again. There’s no sign of Jonny. It could’ve been anyone, she thinks, but—she clings to the logical option, that Jonny survived, that her Mechanism worked after all this _ fucking _ time. She starts moving the rubble, piece by piece, hardly noticing the way the cement scrapes her fingers and bruises her knees.

Then she pulls away a half-melted tangle of wire to find a hand, crushed and bleeding, and a sob rips from her throat.

She’s lucky that Jonny is so much smaller than her, because it takes everything she has left to drag him out of the wreckage. With his body uncovered and draped across her lap, it’s bitterly obvious that he’s dead. Not just dead, but  _ crushed,  _ his head caved in on one side and his chest oozing inky-dark blood in a dozen places, and Carmilla can’t stop crying, can barely see him through the angry tears spilling down her face. It didn’t work. She spent years with the kid, loving him like her own, because he  _ was  _ her own, and she thought it had worked this time, but she wasn’t even fast enough to hold him while he died.

Before she can spiral any farther, Jonny’s entire body twitches in her arms.

“Jonny?” Her voice is a harsh whisper at best, but he starts coughing all the same, his torso wracked with every movement even as the dent in his head starts to fill back in. The bleeding has barely slowed by the time he opens his eyes.  _ “Jonny.” _

He opens his mouth, only to move his lips silently for a few seconds before he can conjure words. “D-Doc?”

“Jonny,” she repeats. “I thought you were  _ dead,  _ I thought—oh, thank fuck, it worked. It  _ worked!  _ You’re—you’re still with me, I’m not—”

“What worked?”

Carmilla realizes that her eyes are screwed shut, and she opens them again to look down at Jonny, taking in the confusion and pain in his eyes. “Your heart,” she explains. “It worked. You’re still alive.”

After another moment of staring at her, Jonny gives himself a once-over and, of course, notices the blood. And the shattered bones, and crushed organs, and broken legs, and the rainbow shimmer visible even through his ragged shirt. “I… was dead,” he echoes.

“No, you’re—you’re fine. You lived. You  _ survived.” _

“I was dead!” The more his chest heals, the louder he gets, even though he’s not strong enough to scramble out of her arms yet. “No, Carmilla, I died. I swear I died. I—the building fell on me, and I died and then I  _ woke up _ again, and died  _ again,  _ and here I am. What… what the fuck did you do?”

She blinks. It’s been… a few years since she replaced his heart, but not really long enough for him to notice that he hasn’t aged. And if he drank himself to death and woke up the next morning here and there, how was he supposed to know? “I fixed your heart,” she replies, voice weak.

“You  _ fixed  _ it. You told me—you said it was m-messed up, that the mechanical heart would keep me from dying, you didn’t…” He trails off, eyes going wide as the awful loophole in her words sinks in. “You didn’t mean  _ now,  _ did you?”

“I said it’d keep you from dying,” she confirms. Her face is hot under the tears soaking her cheeks.

Jonny shakes in her arms, fear and rage and self-loathing spiralling into one horrible beast. “Forever.”

“Jonny,” she begs, “you—you understand, don’t you? I failed so many times, Loreli and the others, you were the first one who didn’t fail, I c-couldn’t—please. Please tell me you understand.”

What’s left of Jonny’s heart breaks in her arms, and Carmilla knows that she has no room left to hope. His mouth twists from some combination of fear and pain, as he struggles to sit up. “I—I—you want me to  _ understand?  _ You go on and on about how lonely and miserable it is to live forever, and then you drag me into it without my consent, and you ask me to understand.”

Carmilla can’t force words from her mouth.

“I do,” he hisses. “That’s—that’s the thing, Doc. Of course I fucking  _ understand.”  _ When her eyes start to widen in hope, he cuts her off. “That doesn’t make it okay! You don’t get to f-fucking immortalize me and then act like—like that makes us a happy family, like—” he cuts off to cough until blood trickles down his chin. “Fuck you. Why—why would you…  _ fuck  _ you.”

By now, he’s strong enough to push her arms off and drag himself to his feet, though his legs wobble under him. Despite the hatred simmering on his face, he still offers her a hand up and fetches her cane from where she dropped it when she started digging. “I’m… I love you, Jonny,  _ please  _ know that.”

“Yeah. Sure. Thought you were about to apologize for a second, good thing you didn’t. Might’ve killed you on the fucking spot.”

“For all the good that would do,” she mumbles.

They lean on each other all the way back to the Silvana, the air between them thick with the shattered remains of something that Carmilla didn’t deserve in the first place. As soon as she gets to her wheelchair, Jonny gives her a sharp nod and turns for the door. “You still want that stupid ship?”

_ Aurora.  _ Sweet, beloved Aurora, or whatever she’s become since the Cyberians got their hands on her. “Please.”

“Sure. I’ll… be back.”

He disappears, and Carmilla’s head drops into her hands.

And no matter how much she hates herself for it, she’s already yearning to try again.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "Have You Tried" by Now, Now because it's my comfort song tm and the reason I'm obsessed w organ music.
> 
> so this is kinda fuckin with timelines—I think canonically the mechs were all mechanized p far apart, but this is imagining a scenario in which Jonny dies for the first time while he and Carmilla are fucking around leading up to the Cyberian revolution, and that's when he realizes what she actually did and loses the last of his faith in her, basically. So Jonny goes off to win the Aurora, and Carmilla's like "welp time to make another child cuz the first one hates me I guess." I'm... not sure how much of that actually comes across in the fic, because I'm tired.
> 
> also! I try to make a point to include mobility devices when I write Carmilla cuz, like, she uses them, and I'm not just gonna ignore that, but I myself don't and I don't really know what I'm talking about, so please lmk if I wrote anything harmful or wildly inaccurate? (If you feel so inclined. It's not anyone else's job to educate me lol.)
> 
> hopefully you're all, uh, enjoying? the pain and suffering im putting you through emotionally? I am! Catharsis. Huzzah. I can't think in sentences anymore, apparently. Goodnight folks. See ya tomorrow.


End file.
